Connect with Romney’s new Facebook App and You Allow Him to be Big Brother

Would you ever want to share your and your friends’ most intimate details with a man that is running for president of the United States? Would you want to share your and your friends’ latest party photos and videos, personal and political opinions, hobbies and health history with a man that applies for the position that’s often described as the position of the most powerful person in the world? Mitt Romney’s new Facebook app basically follows you through your whole life and keeps tabs of your friends, too.

TechCrunch has reported this morning about US presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s new app that’s designed to look at your friends’ geography and history of political activity on Facebook to find out which of your friends are most influential on Election Day. Then the app recommends messaging them. For friends that are identified as being more influential, the app recommends you to post a message on their timeline.

For its analysis, the app collects information of your whole life and of your friends’ lives. At secure.me, we have analyzed the app’s data collection activity and behavior and found out that the app requests the most sensitive permissions, including the permission to read all posts in your news feed, the permission to read your friends list, to post on your behalf and to access your and your friends’ photos, videos, status updates, events, groups and Likes.

Yes, Romney’s app requests to access all of your and your friends’ activities, content and interactions in the world’s biggest social network, which is a privacy intrusion to you, and even more so to your friends who didn’t choose to use the app. It doesn’t matter if you don’t use the app, you just need one of your friends to use it and it will access your data, too.

So think twice before you install the app. If you want to avoid that your friends’ apps get access to your status updates, photos and any other personal data, go to “Privacy Settings“ in your Facebook profile, then ”Edit Settings” of your Ads, Apps and Websites. On the next window, edit the settings of “How people bring your info to apps they use“ and make sure that all boxes are unchecked. This will avoid that friends’ apps can collect any information that’s private.